Yuletide - Joseph - The Adoptive Father

"This is how the birth of Jesus the Messiah came about: His mother Mary was pledged to be married to Joseph, but before they came together, she was found to be pregnant through the Holy Spirit.  Because Joseph her husband was faithful to the law, and yet did not want to expose her to public disgrace, he had in mind to divorce her quietly.

But after he had considered this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, 'Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.  She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.'

All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet: 'The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel' (which means 'God with us').

When Joseph woke up, he did what the angel of the Lord had commanded him and took Mary home as his wife.  But he did not consummate their marriage until she gave birth to a son. And he gave him the name Jesus."

Matthew 1:18-25

Since becoming a father, I've thought a lot about Joseph at Christmas.  The focus of what becoming a father will do to you.  Understanding his position in the story just a little bit better.

He is certainly an enigmatic figure.  We know less about him than we do of Mary and he has a far smaller written role in the life of Jesus than she does.  We know his lineage, tying him to the house of David and requiring him to go to Bethlehem to be taxed/counted.  We know he was a carpenter, or craftsman.  We know he was a just and faithful man.  Beyond that, all we know of him is what happens to him in the early chapters of Matthew and Luke.  The birth, the flight to Egypt, and Jesus at the temple.  From there his story ends.

Some assume that Joseph died before Jesus' ministry ever started.  We know he was not present at the Crucifixion.  If he were, Joseph would have assumed care of his son's body, and Jesus would not have asked John to watch over his mother, Mary.  When exactly Joseph died or by what cause is unknown.

In the greater apocrypha, he is portrayed as an old man, even as old as 90 years old at the time of his betrothal to Mary.  These portrayals are found in the texts that maintain the perpetual virginity of Mary.  Accordingly, James, Joses, Simeon, and Judah/Jude/Judas, and their sisters are claimed to be children from a previous marriage, the step-siblings of Jesus if you will.

Modern protestant view tends to portray him a little younger.  Closer in age to Mary, still in the prime of his life.  That James, Joses, Simeon, and Judah would be the children of Joseph and Mary.  

Whatever the additional details of his life, I can't help but place myself in his position.  The mix of emotions he must have felt when he learned Mary was pregnant.  The awe of the angel's statement.  All leading him to a dark stable, on a cold night, holding this little child that has been entrusted to his care.  Knowing the greatness this child is called to.

There's a song written a few years ago by Mercy Me called Joseph's Lullaby.  A song written from the perspective of Joseph as he sings Jesus to sleep.  It has a line that has haunted me since the first time I heard it.

Go to sleep my Son
This manger for your bed
You have a long road before You
Rest Your little head

Can You feel the weight of Your glory?
Do You understand the price?
Or does the Father guard Your heart for now
So You can sleep tonight?

Go to sleep my Son
Go and chase Your dreams
This world can wait for one more moment
Go and sleep in peace

I believe the glory of Heaven
Is lying in my arms tonight
But Lord, I ask that He for just this moment
Simply be my child

Go to sleep my Son
Baby, close Your eyes
Soon enough You'll save the day
But for now, dear Child of mine
Oh my Jesus, Sleep tight

All the questions that come from looking at an infant child who is the Son of God.  Finally realizing the weight of that statement.  And Joseph's simple request - for one moment, can he just be mine?  Everything else will come, everything else will happen, but can he just be mine right now?  Can he be spared the crushing weight of expectation for one minute?

How often did Joseph and Mary wish to spare Jesus from his destiny?  Did they try to talk him into a safer life?  How often did they pray for his protection, even at the expense of his mission? 

How often did they beg God to spare Jesus from His plan?

I know this is probably not the most appropriate Christian response, but looking over my children and knowing what I would do to protect them, I can imagine the answer is often and frequently.

I know kids need to learn overcoming difficulty and hardship, but every parent, if they knew their children would face real suffering, would face terminal illnesses, agonizing pain, overwhelming hardship, would beg to take their place.

These thoughts take on even greater significance as we are now waiting in the adoption process.  I can imagine the same questions for the child we will adopt.  Can they be free of the brokenness inherent in adoption for just one moment?  Can they just be our child, without the baggage that will be carried around with them?

It puts new perspective on what it must have been like as the adoptive father in this story.  To be the one appointed to watch over Jesus.  To raise him, to teach him a trade, and to set him out on his ministry.

I think there is a little poetry in why Joseph, a carpenter or craftsman was chosen.  God the master craftsman sent his son to a carpenter to apprentice.  Picturing Joseph teaching Jesus how to create, how to restore, how to reuse.  How to repair the broken.  

A picture of our adoptive Father.  What he wants to teach us.  How He restores.  How He repairs.   How He creates.

How great the father's love, indeed.

The Panic Attack

This is the story I promised I would tell.  It took providing the backstory with Our Adoption Story and The Michigan Trip to provide context as to why this induced a panic attack and why we made that trip more stressful on ourselves than it should have been, even beyond the stress this incident caused.

By way of context, the Michigan trip was something we planned for early April, to be a fun weekend getaway for the four of us.  Our first trip as just a family of four and a fun venture to see another state.  Jamie and Avalyn had gotten to make a quick jaunt into Michigan for a meal on a girls' trip, but this would allow us to see state together.  It was supposed to be a trip to Fort Wayne, where we would further explore our new home state, but our reason for going to Fort Wayne was the zoo.  We of course found out it would be closed when we planned to visit.  With that not an option, we changed our plans to Saugatuck and Holland, Michigan.

It is important to note that this trip came shortly after spring break, where we had spent two weeks in Texas with family.  During that trip, we spent a little more on restaurants and eating out that we had planned to, and thought that since this would be such a short trip, we would pack meals to number one, eat healthier, and number two, use our restaurant fund for fun snacks.  Jamie had that Friday before we left pretty wide open, beyond a bible study that morning, so she was planning to prepare and pack the cooler that day, ready for us to leave when Avalyn got out of school.

At this point in our adoption process, we had completed two of the three required homestudy sessions, still had several hours of education remaining to be completed, and had recently learned there were a few key pieces of paperwork not yet filed.  

So when Jamie got a text from our adoption specialist during her morning bible study that Friday morning, asking her to call her, she thought it was related to one of these areas.

Instead, the adoption specialist let Jamie know that there was a birth mother that was going to give birth in two weeks who was questioning her decision and wanted to look at more profile books.  Our adoption specialist didn't have more completed profile books, but knew of a few families like us who were near completion of the process and wanted to ask us if we wanted to be submitted as a potential family for adoption.  Blitzing through the remaining steps for a meeting and ultimate adoption should we be chosen.

To top it off, they needed an answer as quickly as possible.  At the longest, by the next morning.

When Jamie came upstairs to tell me, that's when the panic attack set in.  I know Jamie tells me that she broke down a few times that day, but it wasn't something I saw.  She broke down in calls she made for prayer over the issue. 

I, on the other hand, starting visibly shaking and couldn't come down for nearly two hours after that point.  I've had anxiety attacks before, but those are slow builds of stress and pressure over several days or weeks that release in pain and discomfort.  This was an instant onset of that.

My mind kept racing because it felt like everything was moving so fast.  I saw the first step as Jamie and I discussing whether or not we would be allowing our name to be submitted.  Jamie, by necessity, was starting to work through setting up the things that would be needed if we proceeded.  Each mention of the next piece being set up sent me further into the attack.

It felt like we were skipping a lot of required development just to get a result.  Skipping a lot of essential education that would be of the utmost importance.  In addition, we had virtually nothing for a baby, and would had a few thousand dollars left to save to have the whole process covered.  That would all be necessary in a couple of weeks.

Needless to say, the rest of that day was filled with discussion, and questioning, and asking for prayer requests which turned into a supply drive. The bible study group Jamie was on that morning knew something was up with the adoption process, so when Jamie filled them in on what happened, they got to work collecting a lot for us already.  

The drive to Michigan was nearly completely all about Jamie and I trying to figure out whether or not we should move forward with this.  We kept getting calls from our adoption specialist, giving us more information on the birth mother and child, but that really had no bearing on our decision.  The question that kept gnawing at us was one of timing.

Was this the right time to move forward, or was there more we needed to complete for it to be right?

I think there is a fallacy in Christian circles to assume when things fall into place like this, it is automatically the work of God.  That every easy path is the answer to the prayers that have led up to this point.  While it can be, that is not always the case.

The problem that Jamie and I found is that neither of us could have any joy about this particular situation.  Just terror.  We know this kind of quick turnaround is completely possible once we go live, and we know our reaction will be completely different from what it was then.  At this particular time and in this particular situation, we felt that we still had much more growing and learning to do to be ready.

We decided we were saying no after waking up in the early, early hours Saturday morning.  We then called our adoption specialist at 9:00 am that morning and told her. 

That weight had been lifted.

This didn't mean we didn't feel the effects of this stress for a while.  I felt the physical effects for several days after that Friday, into the next week.  It felt as if I had undergone heavy physical exertion, in addition to ramping up my reflux for that week.  It took a while just to mentally come down from the stress, so we were definitely on edge for the trip.

And here's how we made it harder on ourselves.  Remember the plan to pack food for meals.  Well given the craziness of Friday, the careful planning and packing of the ice chest went out the window.  We had supplies but they were more thrown together in there.  

Instead of giving ourselves grace and a break, we forged on to continue the plan.  Looking back, we know we should have just forgone the attempt to pack the food and just let ourselves enjoy the break and the opportunity.  Bringing the food made us try to keep Avalyn and Jude to it, and of course they didn't want it, so that added to our stress.  

It's something we can look back on now and laugh a bit.  Lessons learned.  And if nothing else, we saw that God can move in a powerful way.  We know we're in the right location because of the outpouring of support we saw should we decide to go forward.

We know when it is our time, we'll be ready.

Our Adoption Story

As mentioned before, I realized this was a part of our lives for the past several months that I had not shared.  So, I wanted to take a blog to kind of catch up and describe our path to adoption and where we are in that process.

We always knew that adoption would be part of our story at some point.  Jamie and I had discussed it when we had started dating.  It was something mentioned as on Jamie's heart from an early point in her life, and something we recognized as going to be a part of our family.  

And this sounds a bit weird to say, but we knew it would be a part of our story because we could.  Though miscarriage and an ectopic pregnancy were part of our family path, we weren't motivated to pursue this because of infertility.  We weren't motivated because of adoption in our family history.  Rather, we were motivated because it was something we recognized that we could do.  That we could help take care of widows and orphans as we are called to.  And that we were in a privileged place to be able to afford the adoption process and to be able to have more children in our home.

While we knew we would adopt at some point, the timing was always the question.  After the ectopic pregnancy was so scary, and after Jude was born healthy, we knew that we were done trying for more biological children.  It was too much of a risk.

Then as our lives went through the upheaval of the job loss, the move, and all that 2019 brought, we began to know that wherever we ended up for my new job, that would be where the rest of our family was.  We knew that after the move, adoption would be the next big change in our life.

Shortly after we moved, we began investigating adoption in Indiana.  At the start, we weren't sure exactly what path for adoption we would take. We knew other families in Texas that had gone through the adoption process, some that had gone through foreign adoption and some through a foster to adopt process.  As we started our investigation, we learned that most Christian adoption agencies were no longer doing foreign adoptions, and are instead focusing their efforts on local adoptions within each country.  Similarly, we learned that Indiana has different laws regarding foster care that make foster to adopt a harder and much, much longer process.

That lead us to infant adoption; which aligned with many concerns that we had.  It focuses on permanent placement, which is something we are desiring.  It would help us preserve birth order, which we have learned is important.  And it encourages openness in the process, for the benefit of the child.

With that confirmed, we started the application process last December.  And there is a lot of paperwork.  It has been a challenge to complete, and I know it has driven Jamie a bit crazy to keep up with, as it seems new documents keep popping up on our page.  Thankfully that part is done.

We're now at a point where we have gone through the complete homestudy process and are waiting for our adoption specialist to finalize her report on the homestudy.  We expect that to be completed by the end of June.  At that point, we would be going live for adoption.

This means, at the end of June, we would be available as adoptive parents.  We have put together a profile book and are working on a profile website that would be shown to expectant mothers.  The expectant birth mother would look over several profiles and identify one she would want to meet.  If we were chosen, we would meet with the birth mother, and she would get to ask us questions and get to know us, trying to decide if she wants to chose us to parent the child.

At that point, the decision is in the birth mother's hands.  And we are in the waiting.

We could get chosen for a meeting as early as the beginning of the third trimester, which would give us a few months to get to know the birth mother and to prepare.  We could be chosen by a mother at the hospital when she is about to or just completed delivering the child.  We have to be ready and to trust in God's timing.

They say the average placement is one to three years, though it could be a month after or longer.  We have heard from a few families where their placement was within six months.

It has been a very revealing process.  It has challenged us as individuals and as a couple.  We have learned things about ourselves that we had previously not known.  There has been a lot of laughter and tears through the process. And it has exposed some insecurities.    But, we've grown closer together and more united.  

I would say, I would not recommend the process to anyone if they are not ready to go through a crucible.  But as for us, we know it is completely the path and journey we are supposed to be on.

So, please keep us in your prayers.  Within a month, we'll be in a waiting period, where everything could change in an instant.

I'll be sharing more of the process as we continue to move through it.  And as promised, I'll shortly share the tale of what made our trip to Michigan such a stressful weekend.